Creating smart tourism destinations requires innovative solutions which cover the main pillars of sustainability as sociocultural, environmental, and economic aspects, in order to spread the cultural heritage of these tourist destinations to their visitors. One of the most demanded approaches by the new hyper-connected visitors is the expectation of plunging and becoming a short-term resident to receive a real experience during their visit. Therefore, the scope of this research covers the objective of designing an innovative communication channel between a visitor and a point of interest (POI), which in turn allows agile experiences to be built and provided and increases the dissemination of cultural heritage through new technologies, considering the real needs of the territories and the new digital visitors. In order to address these topics, this paper proposes an innovative and co-created progressive Web-App for visitors called Be Memories in order to spread the intangible heritage of a tourist destination, where the content is co-created by residents of the destination. The tool has been tested in Ceutí, a Spanish village with a high cultural value, which needs to be disseminated through new innovative tools. The trial was launched during local festivities of the village using an Internet of Things device, called a Smart Spot, to establish a communication channel between the visitor and POI.The results of the test were measured using Google Analytics, the reactions of Be Memories in social networks, and the acceptance of other cities and European committees. The results have concluded that Be Memories is able to enable a local experience via agile, fresh, and crowd-sourced content that people enjoy. This channel presents a complementary level of information with respect to official sources, documentaries, and local guide tours, at the same time enabling a mechanism to promote physical visits, walking tours, and cultural heritage via low-cost and sustainable infrastructure.The tool has been validated in Ceutí, with a highly cultural value, which requires new tools to spread their culture. To carry out the test of Be Memories, 15 Internet of Things (IoT) devices were deployed throughout the village. These devices are called Smart Spots. A Smart Spot generates an area called a smart point of interaction (Smart POI), which sends a notification (non-intrusive) with a URL through Bluetooth (nearby Google technology) and Wi-Fi (captive portal). This communication channel functions without the need to download a native application, facilitating the interaction by proximity [8]. The content of the pilot is composed of a progressive Web-App that offers a seed content (short video-interviews where the residents tell popular stories). The trial was launched during local festivities (6-19 August 2018).The structure of this article begins with the state-of-the-art, where the value of the pillars of sustainable tourism is presented. In addition, the concepts of a smart city and smart tourism destination are explained as the ...

Nowadays, Physical Web together with the increase in the use of mobile devices, Global Positioning System (GPS), and Social Networking Sites (SNS) have caused users to share enriched information on the Web such as their tourist experiences. Therefore, an area that has been significantly improved by using the contextual information provided by these technologies is tourism. In this way, the main goals of this work are to propose and develop an algorithm focused on the recommendation of Smart Point of Interaction (Smart POI) for a specific user according to his/her preferences and the Smart POIs’ context. Hence, a novel Hybrid Recommendation Algorithm (HyRA) is presented by incorporating an aggregation operator into the user-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithm as well as including the Smart POIs’ categories and geographical information. For the experimental phase, two real-world datasets have been collected and preprocessed. In addition, one Smart POIs’ categories dataset was built. As a result, a dataset composed of 16 Smart POIs, another constituted by the explicit preferences of 200 respondents, and the last dataset integrated by 13 Smart POIs’ categories are provided. The experimental results show that the recommendations suggested by HyRA are promising.

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Crowd monitoring was an essential measure to deal with over-tourism problems in urban destinations in the pre-COVID era. It will play a crucial role in the pandemic scenario when restarting tourism and making destinations safer. Notably, a Destination Management Organisation (DMO) of a smart destination needs to deploy a technological layer for crowd monitoring that allows data gathering in order to count visitors and distinguish them from residents. The correct identification of visitors versus residents by a DMO, while privacy rights (e.g., Regulation EU 2016/679, also known as GDPR) are ensured, is an ongoing problem that has not been fully solved. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to gathering crowd data by processing (i) massive scanning of WiFi access points of the smart destination to find SSIDs (Service Set Identifier), as well as (ii) the exposed Preferred Network List (PNL) containing the SSIDs of WiFi access points to which WiFi-enabled mobile devices are likely to connect. These data enable us to provide the number of visitors and residents of a crowd at a given point of interest of a tourism destination. A pilot study has been conducted in the city of Alcoi (Spain), comparing data from our approach with data provided by manually filled surveys from the Alcoi Tourist Info office, with an average accuracy of 83%, thus showing the feasibility of our policy to enrich the information system of a smart destination.